Quantitative evaluation of delay time of head movement for an acoustical telepresence robot: TeleHead

We built an acoustical telepresence robot, TeleHead, which has a user-like dummy head and is synchronized with the user´s head movement in real time. We are trying to clarify the effects of reproducing head movement. In this paper, we evaluated the sense of incongruity induced by the delay time in reproducing head movement. The results indicate that head movement control should have a dead time shorter than 27 ms. In addition, this dead time does not depend on a head shape of an acoustical telepresence robot in terms of guidelines for building an acoustical telepresence robot. The results also suggest that the cue for the discrimination of delay is not the delay time itself. They suggest that subjects might discriminate the difference between the perception of auditory sound localization and somatosensory perception of their head posture.